Pirates of the Caribbean, blah blah blah 3.

I greatly enjoyed the first Pirates of the Caribbean film. It was an actual homage to the old Disney live-actions like Treasure Island and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, full of wit, excitement, loveable characters, dastardly villains, and moments of genuine peril. With a straightforward and well-executed plot, killer score, and gorgeous sets and cinematography, well, what more could you want? Except for that stupid monologue at the end where poor Jonathan Pryce has to say that piracy can be a good thing because he doesn't want to punish his daughter, it was a stupendous film. Corey and I saw Dead Man's Chest in theaters, and were rather upset at having paid so much to do so - for one thing, it fell apart in terms of narrative cohesion. For another, there were no characters left that we could at all sympathize with. In that installment, the East India Company was doing its job of ridding the seas of pirates - something I think, historically, was a good thing - and the closest thing to a legitimate villain was the one EIC guy who double-crossed Jack...but I didn't care that Jack was getting double-crossed, because everyone and their monkey was double-crossing everyone else, regardless of their place in the pantheon of heroes and villains. What really soured that story for me was the ludicrous concept of loyalty as the only measure of right and wrong - Jack, Will, and Elisabeth devolved into a narcissistic trio of absolutely horrid, bratty people, and just kept on doing stupid, destructive things in the name of "loyalty". I didn't even like any of them in that film, Jack especially having transformed from a rogue who we love anyway (a la Han Solo in A New Hope) into a consummate asshole who we're instead told we must love because of, again, loyalty, so what I wound up with was a sloppy story populated with irritating, dislikeable characters. The only one I was in line with, or rooting for, was Jack Davenport's Commodore Norrington, an upright man playing by the rules and helping rid the seas of the evil of piracy. Dead Man's Chest didn't exactly make a case for why this was a bad thing, though it begged us to believe such.

So why, you ask, did I watch At World's End if I hated Dead Man's Chest so much? The answer, my friends, is "it was free."

I'm not too sure what to say about At World's End. It attempted to clear up Dead Man's fatal flaw by setting up the East India Company as an actual immoral organization, in an opening scene wherein they hang a large group of pirates (I'm okay with that!) without due process (I'm not okay with that) - they came very, very close to creating legitimate overall villainy, they recognized that this hadn't been done in the previous film, so kudos to the writing staff for that. Unfortunately, there remained that other fatal flaw, that of Elisabeth and Will crusading to help keep pirates all over the world from being put out of business by the EIC, despite the fact that they've been exposed to enough to see that pirates in general are not good people that one should want to keep around. Of course, there was a greater plot, that of figuring out how to help Jack break his deal with Davy Jones, and again, here the writing staff redeemed themselves by making it clear that no one cared about rescuing Jack because they liked him, but because they wanted something from him that they couldn't get while he was trapped between worlds. Cancel out that redemption with lazy stabs at portraying the main East India officer as evil for doing everything in pursuit of profit (because pirates do everything in pursuit of...um....lupins? Yeah.). Toss in a Davy Jones love story (eeew!) and a mess of other stuff and you have a movie. It was more cohesive than Dead Man's Chest, but not by too much.

That being said, it was beautifully filmed (I mean beautifully), and used its ludicrous budget well. The game attempts to wrap everything up by bringing back incidentals from the first film were acceptably cute, and when the film was funny, it was very, very funny (the pirate council stands out in memory). It has probably the best use of the american Salt Flats I'll ever see on screen. The fabled Keith Richards cameo was shockingly (wonderfully) understated, and inadvertently said a lot about Jack's childish rebelliousness by showing his father as a straight man. And I was not expecting them to end it the way they did - a good twist, sad. Well done.

I suppose I'd have an easier time accepting the villains of the story if the writers had actually incorporated some of the history of the East India Company when looking for ways to paint them black. I mean, these are the people who begun the Opium War because they needed more capital to buy tea. There are a lot of legitimate issues to run on if you want to villainize the East India Company. Anyways.

If you loved Dead Man's Chest, I imagine you've already watched At World's End at least four times. If you thought Dead Man's Chest was pretty lame, and thus have never gotten around to watching the final film, my suggestion is: only if it's free.